A Spark of Light(5)

They passed a billboard on the way to the station. Janine recognized it because she had helped raise money to erect it. It was a picture of two smiling, gummy-mouthed babies—one black, one white. DID YOU KNOW, it read, MY HEART BEAT EIGHTEEN DAYS FROM CONCEPTION?

Janine knew a lot of facts like that. She also knew how various religions and cultures looked at personhood. Catholics believed in life at conception. Muslims believed that it took forty-two days after conception for Allah to send an angel to transform sperm and egg into something alive. Thomas Aquinas had said that abortion was homicide after forty days for a male embryo and eighty days for a female one. There were the outliers, too—the ancient Greeks, who said that a fetus had a “vegetable” soul, and the Jews, who said that the soul came at birth. Janine knew how to consciously steer away from those opinions in a discussion.

Still, it didn’t really make sense, did it? How could the moment that life began differ so much, depending on the point of view? How could the law in Mississippi say that an embryo was a human being, but the law in Massachusetts disagreed? Wasn’t the baby the same baby, no matter whether it was conceived on a bed in Jackson, or on a beach in Nantucket?

It made Janine’s head hurt. But then, so did everything right now.

—


SOON IT WOULD BE GETTING dark. Wren sat on the floor cross-legged, keeping an eye on George as he hunched forward on the couch, elbows balanced on his knees, and the gun held loosely in his right hand. She tore open the last packet of Fig Newtons—all that was left of the basket of snacks taken from the recovery room. Her stomach growled.

She used to be afraid of the dark. She’d make her dad come in with his gun in his holster and check out the whole of her bedroom—beneath the bed, under the mattress, on the high shelves above her dresser. Sometimes she woke up crying in the middle of the night convinced she had seen something fanged and terrible sitting at the foot of her bed, watching her with its yellow eyes.

Now she knew: monsters were real.

Wren swallowed. “Your daughter,” she asked. “What’s her name?”

George glanced up. “Shut your mouth,” he said.

The vehemence of his words made her scoot back a few feet, but as she did, her leg brushed something cold and rigid. She knew right away what it was—who it was—and swallowed her scream. Wren willed herself to inch forward again, curling her arms around her bent knees. “I bet your daughter wants to see you.”

The shooter’s profile looked ragged and inhospitable. “You don’t know anything.”

“I bet she wants to see you,” Wren repeated. I know, she thought, because it’s all I want.

—


SHE LIED.

Janine sat in the police station, across from the detective who was recording her statement, and lied. “What brought you to the Center this morning?” he had asked gently.

“A Pap smear,” Janine had said.

The rest that she had told him was true, and sounded like a horror film: the sound of gunfire, the sudden weight of the clinic employee slamming into her and knocking her to the floor. Janine had changed into a clean T-shirt that the paramedics had given her, but she could still feel the woman’s hot blood (so much blood) seeping into her dress. Even now, looking down at her hands, she expected to see it.

“Then what happened?”

She found she could not remember in sequence. Instead of linked moments, there were only flashes: her body shaking uncontrollably as she ran; her hands pressed against the bullet wound of an injured woman. The shooter jerking his pistol at Janine, while Izzy stood next to him with a heap of supplies in her arms. The phone ringing, as they all froze like mannequins.

Janine felt like she was watching a movie, one she was obligated to sit through even though she had never wanted to see it.

When she got to the part where the shooter smacked her with the gun, she left out why. A lie of omission, that’s what they used to call it when she was a little girl going to confession. It was a sin, too, but of a different degree. Still, sometimes you lied to protect people. Sometimes you lied to protect yourself.

What was one more lie to add to the others?

She was crying as she spoke. She didn’t even realize it until the detective leaned forward with a box of tissues.

“Can I ask you a question?” she said.

“Of course.”

She swallowed. “Do you think that people get what’s coming to them?”

The detective looked at her for a long moment. “I don’t think anyone deserves a day like today,” he said.

Janine nodded. She blew her nose and balled the tissue into her hand.

Suddenly the door opened, and a uniformed officer stuck his head inside. “There’s a gentleman out here who says he knows you … ?”

Behind him, Janine could see Allen—his florid cheeks and broad belly, the one that made him joke that he knew what it was like to be pregnant. Allen was the leader of the local Right to Life group. “Janine!” he cried, and he pushed past the cop so that he could fold her into his arms. “Sweet Jesus,” he sighed. “Honey, we’ve been praying for you.”

She knew they prayed for every woman who walked through the doors of the Center. This, though, was different. Allen would not have been able to make peace with himself if anything had happened to her, because he had been the one to send her inside as a spy.